Martin Luther King Jr. cheated on his senior college thesis. He's a douchebag. Therefore, his "I Have a Dream" speech should be deemed to have a smaller impact on American society and culture. Wait...something doesn't make sense. Can someone point it out to me?

How the fuck do you define what a culture "should" be? Man, we ought to all be discussing Proust, at a 75th grade level, in our virtual classrooms while our fleshy bodies are serviced by Jessica Alba clones. That's what culture ought to be. That's a ridiculous sentiment you need to get over. You have the culture you have, and there is no culture that you "should" have, that you "deserve" to have, or that you "might have had had things gone differently." There is now, and only now, and this is what you get.

QFT. Besides which, there's absolutely no guarantee that your current assessment of the "dominant variables" of our culture will bear any significant relation to future assessments, given that culture is inextricably contextual. Not only is it pointless to talk about how culture "should" be, but we're not even likely to see agreement about what culture is today vs what it was ten years from today.

The whole premise is just so fucked on every level. It's like Hubris out shopping for a hat._________________Hatred is gained as much by good works as by evil. ~ Ellen Degeneres

You make some good points but Thomas Edison was a conniving, greedy douche bag who free stole the credit for others' hard work.

That makes no difference as to whether or not he was a big contributor to American culture and cultural identity, totally independent of a European education. Which is why I think your "for profit" schtick is a steaming mound of excrement, filled with little wriggling worms.

I disagree. I think examining the character of the one who makes a contribution is vital. Why aren't we taught from early on history in terms of 'Thomas Edison was a shitty human who invented great things'? I think the 'who did it' and 'why they did it' of a person's contribution should not be forgotten about in the midst of the more significant 'what they did'. By your reasoning then it shouldn't matter that Walt Disney was a Nazi sympathizer because he's contributed so much to American culture.

Exactly my point, those people did contribute so much to American culture.

So why are you limiting it? People don't exist in a vacuum and I don't think the character, viewpoints, and other more minor deeds which help define them as a person of people should be disregarded in light of great accomplishments but that seems to be exactly what we do time and again. But hey, we're already living living in a place named after one of the greatest douche-bags of all time, a man who told lovely stories about how those savage native american women would readily and almost uncontrollably whore themselves out to white christian men.

I'm not the one trying to disqualify people based on "douchebaggery" or "commercialization," you are. Nothing you have said has anything to do with Amerigo Vespucci, since he is not really a major factor in American culture that would fall under the razor of your criteria for an important/unimportant contributor. It has nothing to do with your claim that most major actors in the 1800-1900s were trying to "ape" European culture. It has nothing to do with the retailer's categorization of music as a benchmark for the birth of a cohesive culture. Once again you're just trying to grab the goalposts and run with them, this time in a totally different direction. I reiterate what I said at the start, your ranting is not well thought out. You should really just stop trying to defend it at this point.